CXetera episode 5: How to transform from customer education to scaled CX?
Or: Adam and Dee Go To A Conference, pt. 2
How do you move from traditional customer education into a true scaled CX program? Or if you’re setting up scaled CX for the first time, how do you avoid pitfalls?
It's part two of "Dee and Adam go to the CEdMA conference" and this time, we do get White Castle! Or at the very least, we get tasty nuggets of wisdom from Dee based on her experience evolving her team from Customer Education into a Scaled CX organization that includes several programs and channels, including Digital Customer Success.
Dee talks about what it means to make this shift, and how owning a segment of customers drives clarity and incentives. This means ideally you should own a completely digital segment of customers who are not owned by CSMs, so you can completely drive their activation, adoption, and retention - and set up variable comp around those outcomes!
She shares design principles she's used to build and lead effective organizations, including:
optionality: building desirable redundancy for customers so they have multiple paths to achieve their outcomes
data hygiene and contact management: you’ll never have perfect data, and this will always be a dumpster fire, so make your piece with it while working closely with your data and ops teams
digital as a foundational journey: make sure that you have a baseline digital happy path journey for your customers, sequenced with content and touchpoints, by looking at your most successful accounts and understanding what milestones they should hit vs. how to intervene when customers show risk markers
hybrid digital and field models: recognize where to use digital campaigns and automations, vs. where to ensure humans get involved - for example, if you see customers bulk exporting data, wouldn’t you want a human to get involved, even an AE? It’s not just about scaling CSMs.
experimentation: test, learn, and iterate to evolve your programs and campaigns - this is how you learn what works and doesn’t work, and which programs drive which outcomes instead of being a “vibes” program
in-house production and experience design: there’s risk in outsourcing parts of your journey, and things get lost in handoffs - outsourcing doesn’t actually make you more innovative or efficient in many cases, so invest in-house in a small team to work faster for things like content and video.
risk monitoring across the journey: understand the signals that lead to non-activation, downsell, and churn - these are complex and varied, and you want to have these flagged to send the right campaigns or involve the right people using signals and CTAs.
resisting false dichotomies: you don’t have to pick Product-Led or Sales-Led growth; digital CS is a segment AND a strategy; we’re in an evolving field and don’t need to put ourselves in a box.
She also shares gotchas, like:
don’t limit your channels to email - you have multiple business channels you need to use in tandem to serve the customer, and you’re not just a lifecycle email team; you’re here to support customer outcomes
don’t leave customer research to your UX team - actually talk to your customers!
don’t become the backwater of your CSM team and only assist their efficiency - ensure you are tying to revenue, retention, and expansion.
We even talk about how you can improve your presentation game using Miro and "Steve Jobs-style keynote" formats.
Check out Dee's slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0zyKQOdskWX8Mr7andJfFj60USDzmk_/view?usp=drive_link
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